Videos From Sudan’s Killing Fields Reveal Ethnic Hatred Behind Massacres

Moments after the militiamen burst into the small adobe house in Sudan’s Kassab displacement camp, a woman inside began pleading for the lives of her sons. As she begged to trade her life for theirs, the paramilitary fighters clubbed her with a rifle butt, according to a passerby, who overheard the encounter and later talked with the family. Then the fighters led the five brothers away.

Shortly afterward, a video showed, several men’s barefoot bodies were seen sprawled face-down in the dust, hands bound behind them, blood seeping across their clothes. Two witnesses identified the brothers’ bodies in the footage.

The immediate aftermath of the execution-style killings last year in Kassab, and others in neighboring Kutum town in Sudan’s western Darfur region, was captured in videos that have remained unpublished until now — rare visual evidence of the slaughter routinely occurring in Sudan as its armed forces battle a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, in a conflict the United States estimates has cost about 150,000 lives.

The killings of the young men who are seen in the videos were part of a massacre of at least 73 people, according to residents of Kutum and the U.N. refugee agency.

The videos underscore the vitriol of Arab militiamen affiliated with the RSF toward their ethnic Black African victims and the toll of that bigotry, which victims say is fueling much of the violence committed by that group against civilians, especially in Darfur.

In one of the videos, a gunman in a white turban gloats over the sprawled, bloodstained bodies of two unidentified men: “Take pictures! This is a victory for the Arabs! This is a victory for the Arabs!”

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About 70 percent of Sudanese identify as Arab, while the rest are primarily from Black African groups such as the Fur, Zaghawa and Nubians. The killings in Kassab and Kutum, which occurred in June 2023, foreshadowed other mass killings of mainly Black African civilians allegedly by the RSF in Darfurian cities such as Nyala and Geneina. [snip}

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Many of the survivors of the slaughter in Kassab and Kutum said their RSF attackers called African civilians “abd,” or slave, a racist insult dating to the days when Arab raiders often enslaved members of Sudan’s Black tribes.

In recent decades, Sudanese Arabs have dominated the top ranks of the government and military, and grievances among minority groups have sparked several uprisings in neglected regions.

Such discontent led to a previous war in Darfur, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives from 2003 to 2020. During that conflict, the RSF’s predecessor, an ethnically Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, collaborated with the military to target African rebels and their families. The attacks against African tribes were so widespread and systematic that the International Criminal Court said they amounted to genocide. Now U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned that ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes are happening again.

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